Why Do North Koreans Invade The U.S. In 'Red Dawn' Remake? For The Money, Of Course.

Back in a simpler time, the enemy was simpler. They didn’t own all of our debt or build our iPads or have way better airports than we do. They were the vaunted Soviets, their cars sucked, they didn't have cable and sometime around 1984, they invaded the United States in a desperate attack aimed at messing up Patrick Swayze’s hair.

It was just a movie, of course, but when John Milius’ B masterpiece, ‘Red Dawn’ came out and was immediately condemned as “the most violent movie ever made” it became a beloved Gen-X staple.

If you’ve never seen it, the plot is a cool meditation on the uselessness of global power in the face of the innate human hunger for freedom. Or somesuch. Soviets parachute into Colorado. All the good looking high school kids--including Charlie Sheen, somehow foreshadowing something--head for the hills, leaving the less-good looking ones behind. They hole up in the mountains. Then they shoot people. A lot of people. And blow stuff up.

There are, of course, subplots: it snows a lot; they meet a grown up pilot; they are attacked by bad dialogue. The high point (spoiler alert!): they yell “Wolverines!”, giving birth to the second most often-quoted line in any gathering of 40-something-year-old men. (Number one: “It’s in the hole.”)

It was/is dopey, comfy-as-mashed-potatoes fare. It was also, if the reviews are to be believed, the intellectual equivalent of ‘My Dinner With Andre’ compared to the botched remake teetering MGM is trying to foist on the moviegoing public this weekend.

The new Red Dawn has racked up a wonderous 10% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes so far, with critics across the country strafing it more mercilessly than Pete Wells reviewing a Times Square theme restaurant.

“Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast,” raves the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Preposterously insincere,” says The Globe and Mail. “Bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics,” says The New York Times.

Reviewers harbor special animus for the film’s soft, chewy center. The invaders this time aren’t the vaunted Red Army. They’re—duh--the North Koreans!

Why the North Koreans? Their uncanny prowess on the world stage? Their obsessive compulsion to work fissile material into cruel lethality? No, silly. It’s that a more likely (okay, at least vaguely possible) enemy here – the Chinese—also happen to control the fastest-growing movie market in the world. And they’re not going to screen a movie (they limit foreign films to 20 a year) that shows them invading anyone they sell so many consumer electronics too, especially if they then get their butts kicked by the guy who also plays ‘Thor’.

How’d they get here? Ben Fritz and John Horn at the LA Times detailed the whole amusing mess in March, 2011. "The studio needed new villains, since the U.S.S.R. had collapsed in 1991. The producers substituted Chinese aggressors for the Soviets and filmed the movie in Michigan in 2009," they wrote. Immediately after, every distributor they had with any business sense got cold feet. "As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from 'Red Dawn,' substituting dialogue and altering the film." Bye-bye Chinese, hello Photoshop, hello, North Koreans.

It is, as they pointed out, just one of the ways that China is increasingly influencing Hollywood. Where moviemakers were once just terrified of their films being pirated by audiences in China, now they’re scared of audiences not seeing their films at all.

If you’re interested in hearing more about Hollywood’s increasing reliance on China, and the yoga-like flexibility they’ll exercise to stay in that country’s good graces, let me recommend a recent must-read profile by Forbes’ Simon Montlake of Dan Mintz, who runs DMG, or Dynamic Marketing Group. DMG acts as a kind of fixer for Hollywood studios looking to break into the Chinese market, and Mintz is a great introduction into this crucial new business. It’s a great read.

Let me also recommend that if you’re in the mood to see young people with perfect teeth and great hair use high-powered weaponry to secure America’s freedom, skip the silly new Red Dawn and go back to a time when Reagan was king, the enemy was clear, and leg warmers seemed, you know, a little sexy. Make the kids watch, too. Who knows, they just might learn something important about history. Like why daddy and his high-school buddies yell Wolverines! when they hang out on the weekend.

I'm Managing Editor for Business News at Forbes, helping to lead our print and online coverage of everything from Detroit to Washington to Hollywood. Previously I directed online news for The New York Times, was business editor of NYTimes.com and co-founded DealBook, a popul...